OPINION: Death Stranding Won't Be As Fun As Death Stranding Theories

Follow the handprints, untangle the rope

Welp, Death Stranding finally has a release date, and come November 8th, we’ll finally be able to unpack its many mysteries and maybe actually understand that what the Hell Hideo Kojima’s latest game is about… But as much as I’m dying to play it myself, part of me really doesn’t want the rampant speculation to end.

Much of the fun of Kojima’s games is how much they mess with the player, and even as far back as the first Metal Gear Solid, they’ve been pushing the boundaries of how players interact with the game. Between hiding Meryl’s codec frequency in plain sight on the back of the game case, to having Psycho Mantis make the screen go black until we switched controller ports, Kojima’s idea of how we should play a video game was not limited to the simple act of pushing buttons on a controller to make things happen on a screen.

Metal Gear Solid 2’s fourth-wall-obliterating final act posed a number of terrifying questions about the overload of data in the information age, and how technology has led to an increasingly shaky definition of “reality.” Or something like that. It was a mindf*** when the game came out, and it’s more relevant than ever in the age of deep fakes, machine learning, and information warfare. It would seem that even back in the dial-up days of 2001, Kojima had a solid grasp of The Internet's behavior patterns.

As a longtime Metal Gear fan, the most exciting part of Death Stranding is that it’s (probably) not a Metal Gear game. Whatever it is, Kojima’s spent the last three years sprinkling a trail of breadcrumbs that certain corners of the internet have been gobbling right up, and in a sense, that’s part of the game.

As Mr. Kojima told IGN back in 2016, “It’s one of the unique things about games, that you can start having fun with people before you release the game. There are things I intentionally put there so that I can start this back and forth process with players, because I think it’s fun for everyone.”

Every time a new Death Stranding trailer has dropped, I’ve found myself obsessively digging through fan theories and discussions on forums, usually with about two dozen browser tabs open, falling down myriad Wikipedia rabbit-holes and racking up a list of lesser-known films I should watch for "clues."

Redditor u/phantom-nugget pointed out on r/DeathStranding that a number of the game’s characters could be named after movies: Amelie, Mama, Fragile, and Dead Man are also names of films that seem to deal with certain themes that we think Death Stranding might be about. Of course, we don’t quite know what Death Stranding is actually about, that leaves a lot of room for interpretation.

Here’s something we do know: before Death Stranding, Hideo Kojima was working on a Silent Hill reboot with Guillermo Del Toro, which was to star Norman Reedus. The original Silent Hill was influenced heavily by the 1990 Adrian Lyne film Jacob’s Ladder, which deals heavily with the idea of purgatory and the afterlife, much like the works of English poet William Blake. You know, the William Blake who wrote the poem at the beginning of the first Death Stranding trailer, who's not to be confused with the name of the character in the film Dead Man, the movie with the same name as the character in Death Stranding played by Guillermo Del Toro.

Do I sound crazy? Probably.

Am I having wildly drawing these connections between possibly unrelated ideas? Absolutely.

Do I have a ridiculous amount of tabs open in my browser? Oh, God, so many tabs.

Stranger things have happened. Metal Gear Solid V was announced as just “The Phantom Pain,” a brand new IP from the previously unheard-of Moby Dick Studio, headed by a mysterious bandaged man named Joakim Mogrem whose first name happened to be an anagram of Kojima and whose last name contained the word “Ogre,” the working title for Kojima’s next game, who panicked in an interview when Geoff Keighley asked him if The Phantom Pain was running on Kojima Productions' new engine.

I personally don’t think Death Stranding is a Metal Gear game, but I’ve been fooled before. During GamesCom 2014, when Sony nonchalantly released a free demo for a new horror game called “P.T.”, I didn’t suspect there would be the trailer for a new Silent Hill game buried at the end of its spooky shifting hallway. Sadly, the departure of Kojima and his colleagues from Konami just seemed a little too real to be part of a long-tail ARG promotion for a new game from a different publisher.

Kojima’s games tend to play with our heads. When I first played Metal Gear Solid 2 back in 2001, I was expecting to play as Solid Snake the whole time, and that didn’t happen. Expectations are funny like that. I expect I’ll enjoy Death Stranding, and I’m expecting it to do some stuff I don’t expect it to… But at the end of the day, I expect it’ll just be a video game.

After I play Death Stranding, I might still have unanswered questions, but the game will become a known quantity, and after three years of daydreaming and theorizing everything it could be, that will undoubtedly be something of a bittersweet letdown.